The World's Strangest Borders Part 5: Divided Islands

this video was made possible by skill share start learning new skills for free for two months by being one of the first 1000 a sign up at SK LSH slash real life floor 32 there are thousands and thousands of islands scattered across the world's oceans some are gigantic like Greenland while others are tiny like this one that the British still decided to claim and build something on anyway but out of all of these thousands of islands in the ocean only 16 of them have a border across them because there's only 16 that are actually shared by more than just a single country and despite there only being 16 of them a lot of these borders are pretty wacky so let's start with the biggest island in the world that has a border across it New Guinea it's divided roughly in half between the independent state of Papua New Guinea in the east and Indonesia in the West despite there being only two countries that exist on the island though New Guinea is probably the most diverse location on the entire planet there are around 1000 different and unique tribes that are scattered across the island and just as many different languages spoken by each of them if each of these tribes and languages have their own independent country for themselves New Guinea would end up looking something a lot like this but as it stands today there are only two countries on the island and the line that divides them separates a lot of these tribal areas and languages in half which you could probably guess as a lasting legacy from the time of Dutch and British colonialism on the islands next up though is Borneo the third largest island in the world and the only one on this list to be politically divided between three different countries there's the Indonesian side the Malaysian side and the tiny country of Brunei located inside of the Malaysian side but Brunei gets weirder the closer you look at it you see it's cut in half by territory that belongs to Malaysia meaning that if people in Brunei want to get to the other side of their country without passing through Malaysia their only options are either by boat or by air the next biggest divided island is one of the most controversial in the world Ireland 5/6 of the island belongs to the Republic of Ireland while the remaining 1/6 in the northeast corner to Northern Ireland's which is a part of the United Kingdom however despite being called Northern Ireland the Republic of Ireland actually extends further to the north which you can see when I draw this line from the northern tip out over so called Northern Ireland next up is the island of Hispaniola the second largest island in the Caribbean and one of the strangest on this list it's strange because the island is divided right down the middle between two countries that couldn't be any more different Haiti in the West and the Dominican Republic in the East Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere while the Dominican Republic is substantially better off with an economy and incomes that are nearly ten times higher Spanish is spoken on the dominican side while French and Haitian Creole are spoken on the Haitian side the Dominican Republic is 73% mestizo and 16% wipes while the Haitian side is 95% black Haiti has significantly less natural resources and has a far higher population density as well all of these enormous differences between the two halves of the same island make the border across it one of the starkest and the most obvious in the entire world but there's definitely other islands that have a lot weirder borders if you're a big fan of border Gore from games like crusader kings or europa universalis then you're gonna love taking a look at Cyprus it's not really that big of an island it's over 80 times smaller than Borneo and yet it's vastly more controversial and has even more political entities and drama on it there's the Republic of Cyprus which takes up most of the southern half of the island and is widely internationally recognized as legitimate then there's the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus that's very surprisingly in the north of Cyprus and is only recognised internationally by Turkey there's a few left over british-controlled relics of the Empire still remaining about and then there's the neutral UN occupied border barrier that stretches across the entire island basically there's four different governmental administration's that all exist wedge together on a relatively small island and it makes for some pretty wacky situations for example the Republic of Cyprus is an EU Member State in the you considers the entire island to the EU territory despite the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus definitively not being in the EU and the UK military outposts definitively not being either post brexit the Eastern British territory of Dhekelia is particularly confusing though for multiple reasons let's zoom into this part of the territory first this part is Cyprus which is completely surrounded by British land and this part is also Cyprus surrounded by mostly British land they're divided by a British road that cuts between them and this part is only home to a Cyprus controlled and staffed power station that for some reason exclusively provides electricity and power for the British territory and not the Cyprus territory then there's these other two weird exclaves of Cyprus inside of the British zone which citizens of Cyprus can only get to by going through the British land and then the British control this narrow long long road that stretches all the way out to even more British land because the British apparently didn't want to deal with any exclave situations like Cyprus does on their own Island for our next weird island we're going over to Western Europe it may not look like it from here but France and the Netherlands actually do share a land border with one another it just isn't in Europe it's on this random island on the other side of the world here in the Caribbean called st. Martin the southern side belongs to the Netherlands and the northern side belongs to France the French side is in the European Union and uses the euro while the Dutch side for some reason isn't and uses the netherlands antilles Kildare the main airport is located over on the Dutch side of the island so even most French people who visit the French side have to fly into the Dutch side first and since the island technically isn't in the European Union's Schengen area despite the French side actually being in the European Union there are actually border checks and custom stations on the only land border between France and the Netherlands that citizens crossing over must pass through most of the politically divided islands in the world are the fault of Europeans at some point or another so it's only fair that a few would actually be located in Europe it's and most of them are all located in the Baltic like you Saddam here that's divided between Germany and Poland Kataya that's just narrowly divided between Finland and Sweden and Co eluate oh that's cut between Finland and Russia but by far the wackiest divided island in the Baltic and perhaps even the world is Merck hats with these janky borders divided evenly between Finland and Sweden it's a completely uninhabited Rock that only has a single building on it a lighthouse that was constructed by Finland over here so the reason why this catastrophe of a border exists is because way back in 1809 Sweden and Finland which was then controlled by Russia agreed upon their mutual maritime border that stretched through the Baltic unfortunately the border passed right over this rock and nobody at the time really cared or noticed because it was an uninhabited crappy Little Rock but almost eighty years later however in 1885 the Finns just up and decided one day that they were gonna build a lighthouse on it and they naturally built it on the tallest part of the islands unfortunately that part was over on the Swedish side of the island but the Finns didn't really care and did it anyway the Swedes thought oh my god how dare they build that on this rock we didn't even really know existed until now and so they began loudly protesting to Finland about it for literally the next 100 years neither side would budge on the issue even after the Finns made the lighthouse fully automated in 1979 eventually though a hundred years after they built that damn lighthouse over in what was technically Sweden the Finnish and Swedish governments finally managed to come to an arrangement they made them both happy in 1985 they simply pulled up the map adjusted the border to the zig-zag pattern that you can see today which placed the stupid lighthouse over on the Finnish side and gave Sweden some rocky compensation on the eastern side the border adjustment was carried out strategically so that neither side lost any territory so their national pride could stay intact and their coast lines on the island were also left unchanged so that their fishing rights would not be interfered with and apparently they've both been pretty happy ever after that so figuring out how to equally divide a useless and rocky island is probably not the best way to spend time productively but neither is just endlessly watching videos on YouTube or Netflix if you're still stuck at home right now but you want to spend your free time learning more useful and productive skills that'll help you out in life then you should go and check out Skillshare next they have a class that I've been taking myself by my friend Thomas Frank called real productivity how to build habits that last it's taught me how to stay more organized and productive while staying at home and making these videos on the channel and it will help you learn the same helpful habits too that you can apply to your own hobbies to school or to work but even if you're already outrageously productive Skillshare will definitely have something else for you too they've got thousands of classes for creative people to improve their skills in every subject from animation to coding to painting to music to marketing and so much more there's plenty of options for you to take at any skill level and the classes have short lessons that can fit into any schedule you might have best of all though you can get two months of taking any class on Skillshare you want completely for free by being one of the first 1,000 people to sign up at sk LSH plush real life lor 32 or by clicking the link down in the description and as always thank you for watching

Channel: RealLifeLore

Views: 1,824,163

Rating: 4.9011998 out of 5

Keywords: real life lore, real life lore maps, real life lore geography, real life maps, world map, world map is wrong, world map with countries, world map real size, map of the world, world geography, geography, geography (field of study), facts you didn’t know, strangest borders, strangest borders in the world, weirdest borders, weirdest borders in the world, borders, bizarre borders, divided islands, world's strangest borders, the world's strangest borders part 5

Id: 63xqKDe3JTU

Length: 9min 59sec (599 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 10 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Captain_Alpha]

Although I usually like their content I feel that they misrepresented the situation with the British bases.

[u/mehmettrnc]

This guy made another video about the borders in Cyprus in this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrJSdYCkoWk&list=PLyXor-IbFvGR37eL0G4eSwO9GczeUcY89&index=4&t=207s

Cyprus is at 2:31